Friday, November 13, 2015

The blast that took down a Russian Airbus A321 over the Sinai last month, had to be triggered by a bomb, an experienced explosives expert said today. "If the information about the plane being at 31,000 feet is reliable, it's not a fuel air explosion," Merritt Birky, a former safety investigator with the NTSB told me. Lacking any indication that a missile hit the airplane, Birky's conclusion eliminates the other possible scenario, that the plane came apart mid flight due to an explosion in the plane's center fuel tank.

Thursday, November 5, 2015

All over the news today is the story of the UK and Irish
governments canceling flights out of Sharm el Sheikh. British Prime Minister
David Cameron told reporters “ a bomb was more likely than not” to have brought
down the Airbus A321 flown by the Russian charter airline, Metrojet.

But be cautious about drawing
conclusions based on the reaction of government officials concerned about protecting
the lives of citizens flying out of the Egyptian resort town. It is the job of Prime Ministers and other political leaders to be prudent and investigate
what could have happened to determine if a real threat exists. That's not to say what is worrying them is what actually happened.

Tuesday, November 3, 2015

It never ceases to amaze me how often senior airline bosses will prattle on regardless of what they know about the subject. The latest you've-got-to-be-kidding remarks come from Alexander Smirnov, the deputy general director of the airline, Metrojet whose Airbus A321 crashed over Egypt's Sinai peninsula on Sunday.

"We rule out a technical fault of the plane or a pilot
error," the executive said at news conference in Moscow on Monday and adding fuel to the speculation that the Airbus A321 was brought down by a terrorist. "The only possible (sic) could be a purely mechanical
external impact," Smirnov said.